Matt Maier

Suggestions

One way to start fixing that narrative is to move your opinion to the back and your happy customer's opinions to the front. "We want people to do X" is less compelling than "I was so delighted that they enabled me to do X".

Communications

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 2:03 PM Matt Maier <blueback09@gmail.com> wrote:
Using yourself as an customer example is great, but it also points to this as a B2B play, not B2C.

It is B2B at the point of finding Instructors / OSPD worldchangers. That's the current step, no?

Yes, but, the B2B is finding Instructors in existing businesses, and then it's collaborating on a trillion dollar distributive enterprise thingy after that. Does that make sense?

Consumers care a lot about signaling because they don't make the purchase decision in terms of ROI. So if you want to sell something to consumers it helps to know exactly what they want to signal. For example, maybe "buy an open drill, donate an open drill" where their purchase funds a drill being locally made and used in some other place and both drills have some custom message built into them like " Congo [handshake emoji] Houston 2019".

Now you're talking.

Selling to other businesses is more about the ROI because the businesses know how much money disposable drills are costing them.

Ah, you're talking about customers after the product is developed. I am not expecting the normal customer (busy producer) to participate in development - i'm focusing on open source privileged people entrepreneurs to help develop.
And if you build the GNU/Linux of electric hand drills, where the user experience is secondary,
No, we're talking about going to Home Depot et al for distribution if they play with us.
the point is to lower R&D costs by having all of the interested businesses pool resources via the OSHW license.

Yes, independent producers are a target market.

Then local makers can make a living off of training and support for the ecosystem of drills, provided they can convince a local market of drill-users to adopt "the Linux of drills".

The OSE Distributive Enterprise (call it OSES for Open Source Everything Store) provides marketing support and enterprise infrastructure to help.

In both cases, it's better to dig the demand out of the market than to push the supply into the market. Who can you name that *already knows* they need a better solution than disposable drills?

Marcin and Catarina. Michel Dhoore. Scott Mader. These are all OSE people. We can probably sprout a campaign with contractors or fab shops that inventory a dozen or more drills, and who see 3+ year savings. Maybe school shops where people break stuff all the time. Don't know where this place is. I've heard of some contractor companies, maybe electric utility, that hires people and provides tools. They can save tons there. But that's later - we need to develop the product first. The HeroX is where that happens, and I don't think we'll have trouble raising $500k ($250k reward + overhead) for that - my question would be how to pay this $250k overhead forward right now as we build the team. I just need help building the team, we have potentially 7 people https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/STEAM_Camp_Team but we need way more to fill the dev tasks.
Do they talk to each other about how they need a better solution than disposable drills? Who leads that conversation?
We need to find this out, I'm thinking soon - before Sep 2020 challenge so we invite all of them to participate. Participate in funding more - I am thinking start a crowdfunder as we offer the $250k so the prize is larger than $250k and there is more excitement.

If that conversation isn't happening it's probably a better idea to listen to the conversations that are happening. Then identify a consistent problem they're trying to solve without success right now that OSHW tools can fix. Filter for whatever makes them emotional. Emotions predict purchases, but it needs to be a top-3 problem.

Bonus points if you can find a subscription model! Like, if the reason drills stop working is the motor burns out after a year, they can subscribe to a 6-month motor replacement. Or maybe they just subscribe to the drill function instead of owning it.

Hmm. That's possible. Maybe we sell subscriptions - which I like from closed loop materials perspective. But that sounds like down the road once we have a producer in every state and city.
They could get a "new" drill in the mail every month, then drop their "old" drill in the box and mail it back.

I like it. Dollar Shave Club.
The service refurbishes the drills. This could totally eliminate in-field failures because the drill is serviced before it can malfunction. Combining local work centers with on-demand logistics like Uber Shipping could result in same-day turnaround, keeping money in the local economy, and laying the groundwork for replacing other buy-then-trash tools with subscription services.